Psalm 51:1-17 David's Confession of Sin (sermon for the start of Lent)

Ashes have been used down through the ages as a synbol of, grief, sorrow and suffering. They have been employed to mark occasions of personal loss; to acknowledge national catastrophes, and the loss of life and prosperity these brought with them. Ashes have been used as an outward sign of the inner devastation an individual or a community felt.

Today, Ash Wednesday, we employ the use of ashes as an emblem of grief and mourning to signal our awareness of our sinfulness, as we begin the season of Lent. Our reading this evening from Psalm 51, is in keeping with this theme of penitenance that runs throughout Lent, it is a confession of sin. But it is also a looks forward beyond the power of sin to the power of God’s grace. And that too is the message of Ash Wednesday and the journey of Lent.

Psalm 51 is David’s confession to God. David had committed adultery with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, a faithful warrior in David’s army. When Bathsheba discovered she was pregnant, David tried to conceal his sin, eventually plotting to have Uriah killed in battle. David then took Bathsheba to be his own wife. But no matter how crafty David was, he could not hide his sin from God. God sent the prophet Nathan – who exposed David’s sin and confronted him with God’s judgment. This psalm is said to be David’s heart wrenching confession after this encounter.

When we read the psalm we notice, however, that there is nothing in it that explicitly refers to these events. There is no mention of Bathsheba, or Uriah, Nathan or David. This is why this psalm has become so popular, David speaks for us all, because we have all experienced the pain of guilt, and we have all cried out for forgiveness and healing. Psalm 51 is for us a model of confession; a template, if you will.

The first thing we notice is David’s brutal honesty. He doesn’t hold anything back, he’s letting it all go. There is no argument on David’s lips, no indictment of God, no hint that there is anyone to blame but himself. He writes, “I know my transgressions – my sin is ever before me.” He doesn’t try to blame anyone else, or find excuses for his actions, he owns his sin. Until we own our sin we cannot begin to truly confess it before God.

This leads us to the next point – sin is confessed before God. When we think of sin, we tend to think in terms of the wrong we do to other people, but sin is first and foremost against God. Do we hurt others when we sin? Of course we do, but other people are not the standard of right and wrong, God is. Whenever we commit a sin, or hurt someone, we are first and foremost insulting God. That is why David says, “Against you – you alone have I sinned – and done what is evil in Thy sight.”

In relationship to God we have to own our sin as our own – without any excuses – and we have to stand squarely before God as the one whom we have offended and the one to whom we can say without qualification “you are justified when you speak and blameless when you judge.”

That would seem like a scary prospect if all we knew about our relationship with God was how different God is from us. Every Sunday we confess our sins together. When we do that we are not dwelling morbidly on our sins – as if there was no remedy or as if God simply wants us remind ourselves of how bad we are. Instead we pray as David prays here, with the assurance that God has a great plan for us beyond the clutches of sin. “You desire truth in the innermost part of me,” David acknowledges, “deep down you want me to know wisdom.”

Someone once said, “The ability to make good choices come from wisdom. Wisdom comes from experience. Most experience is the result of bad choices.” We grow in wisdom by acknowledging our faults. When we do this before God, God gives us the desire and the ability to avoid falling into the same traps of sin over and over again.

David pleads “Create in me a clean heart, O God, renew a steadfast spirit within me, do not cast me away, restore to me the joy of salvation…” As Christians, we should not get stuck in the rut of sin, but look beyond the emptiness and brokenness of the moment to the new possibilities God offers. In verse 13 we see that God is already beginning to plant ideas in David’s head of what a restored life will look like: I will teach so others also we believe in you; v. 14 I will joyfully sing; v.15 I will declare your praise. This psalm is insistent that to be forgiven is not to return to some status quo we had before – it is to be changed, it is to throw off the old and put on the new.

In verse 17 we read. “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” This psalm shows us that we cannot ask for lips to praise until we have engaged in a profound yielding and emptying of ourselves before God.

The message of this psalm is that there is nothing that God cannot forgive, there is nothing that He does not know. The only question is will we be brutally honest with ourselves and place ourselves before God, will we cry out as David did – with total abandon, and yet with total faith – that the broken pieces of our lives will not be scattered, but will be taken up by the Master potter and fashioned into something new and beautiful, and worthy of worship.

God loves each of us just as we are; but because he loves us, he will not leave us as we are. In the prophet Ezekiel we hear this promise, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will be careful to observe my voice.”

As we start this season of Lent, we acknolwedge that apart from the grace of God we are absolutely incapable of dealing with sin in our lives, but through God’s grace we are given the promise of new life.

Tonight we look forward and toward Jesus. Jesus, who knew no sin, but was made sin on our behalf. The great mercy of God that David anticipated, and the great sense of God’s utter justice that he respected, we see focused in Jesus Christ. God’s right judgment upon sin was poured, not on us, – but onto Him. Through Jesus’ submission to God on the cross, we can share in the God’s mercy and forgivness. Even from the cross upon which he suffered, Jesus pleaded for us “forgive them, for they do not know what they do.” Tonight we turn to Jesus; we behold the cross and look also beyond it, so that we may “consider ourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.”